A Pernicious Illusion
by nicole297
Summary: Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm learned a hard lesson 15 years ago. Billy Brennan spent a year recovering from the same lesson. That's the trouble with life, though. It never really lets you stop learning. And sometimes it drags new people, kicking and screaming, along for the ride. (edit)


_Between the idea_

_And the reality_

_Between the motion_

_And the act_

_Falls the Shadow_

-'The Hollow Men', TS Eliot

**ONE**

"You can't see anything? At all?"

She sensed something moving past her nose and leaned back a little.

"Cortical blindness," Rachel explained. "I can't see your hand in front of my face but that doesn't mean I don't know it's there."

"But you can't see it even a little – can you feel it or something?" Billy asked, dropping his hand.

"No. Well, maybe. I don't know. It's just – it's kind of the first thing everyone does." She shrugged.

They sat, still stunned after the morning's events for a few minutes, not sure what to say to one another. Back when the compound they had taken shelter in had been in business, Rachel imagined the hum of halogen lights and computers would have drowned out the awkward silence. No such luck anymore. Isla Sorna was entirely deserted these days.

Granted, Isla Sorna had been a ghost town for over a decade now – one of the consequences that came with tragic failure in the field of genetic research. Another consequence was the one that both Billy and Rachel were currently the victims of.

"So Malcolm is your dad?"

"As much of a father as Ian Malcolm can be." It was harsh, considering how helpful he'd been as of late. But after twenty-something years of 'convenient parenting', as she'd come to call it, wiping the slate clean wasn't easy.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Billy didn't blame her for disliking Malcolm. Hell, he didn't like the guy and they'd only met a week earlier. She'd known him her whole life.

"Same reason I didn't mention I can't see a dinosaur if it's two inches from my face. I didn't want to be disposable to our friend back there." She nodded back over her right shoulder, but her sense of direction was all wrong. They had left the mercenary's body a few hundred yards to her left when they had taken refuge.

Rachel was still reeling from the fact that someone would kidnap her because someone else had already taken her father hostage, but the circumstances didn't allow for a whole lot of personal reflection. Of course, the mercenaries who had taken her hadn't known much of anything and literally paid the price in pounds of flesh.

Billy moved a little closer to Rachel's face, careful not to breathe or make any sounds – he just wanted a better look at her eyes. They weren't damaged; a little red, perhaps, but no scratches or lesions on the iris or cornea that he could see.

"How could he not know?" Billy asked, sitting back again.

"The mercenary? In this kind of a situation, people tend not to see things they aren't looking for." She pushed her hair out of her face. It looked like it hadn't been brushed in weeks.

"Is that supposed to be a joke?" he asked, and watched her face snap up to where she thought his was. It took a second to remember what she had just said.

"It would be, if it was funny." Her hand rubbed one side of her face, but he could see an embarrassed smile creeping into the corners of her mouth. For a moment he smiled down at his lap, trying to let her see him laugh too before he realized why that wouldn't work.

"It's a little funny," he admitted. Rachel shook her head at him.

She couldn't remember much about Billy Brennan, even with what secrets her father had pried out of Ellie Sattler about Alan Grant's trip to Isla Sorna years back. The title "research assistant" came to mind, but that could've been one of Ian Malcolm's famous digs. But he had a low, kind of gravelly voice and it was pleasant enough. Or maybe he was pleasant and she was projecting that onto the only part of him she could these days.

"The mercenary, Regis, he said you helped bag a specimen?" His head was turned away from her and the words sounded like an accusation.

"He bagged it – I just told him what it was." She wasn't sure what he was asking.

"But how – I mean, did you just stick your hand in a cage and guess…"

"I got him to tell me what it looked like." She said plainly.

"And they didn't guess something was wrong then?" Billy still didn't believe he hadn't noticed sooner and he'd only known her a few hours. Those guys had spent days with her.

"Not if you ask the right questions. 'How many meters is it standing up do you think', 'What color would you call that', 'Check and see if its teeth are flat'…"

"So you know what a dinosaur is supposed to look like from someone else describing it?"

She looked a little insulted by the question. "I can take an educated guess," she said. "I can't guarantee I was right."

"It just seems like a hard thing to learn that way. I guess I always just learned the easy way…" Billy cringed as he said it. He hadn't meant it to come out like that.

"The easy way?" Rachel's brow knitted together, waiting for an explanation.

"You know… sight." He stared at her legs, stretched out towards him, intent on not looking her in the face. Her ankles were covered in bruises and dried blood where her pants ended at her calves.

She blinked a little too much for a minute, then laughed. Billy glanced up.

"You think - no! I've only been like this for about a year. Oh, god – like you're picturing me reading, no." Rachel went on laughing.

Billy's mouth pulled into a smile, too. "Sorry."

"Yeah, I don't know how many books on paleontology are printed in Braille, but I'm guessing it's not a lot."

"Okay, okay. Point made." He shot her a look she couldn't see.

"Great – we're risking our necks to find something useful to get us off this island and these two are having, having a, a stand-up hour at The Apollo." Ian Malcolm's voice cut through everyone's good mood.

The only good news there was that he was much more sufferable in a bad mood than a good one. No one really liked a happy Ian Malcolm. No one except Ian, that was.

"No radios or phones in any of the vehicles – not even the new ones," Alan Grant elaborated.

"Did you check Regis? Or are they still -" Rachel frowned the rest of the sentence for them.

"We tried to stay away from that particular graveyard, thank you very much, lamb chop." Malcolm reached down to put a hand on top of his seated daughter's head.

Some part of him was grateful that all of his children looked like their mothers, but unfortunately that meant they were all flypaper for suitors. Kelly had gotten engaged twice during college and he had heard from an old friend that his son had been divorced three times. And here was his youngest daughter Rachel, without her half-sibling's track records, baiting Dr. Grant's protégé on an island made of Godzilla's wet dreams. Like father, like, well…

"Did he have one on him, are you sure?" Grant asked. If it was a shot at getting out of hell, he'd take his chances with the compies. Anything to save him from having to climb another tree or listen to Malcolm's damned running commentary.

"Yeah. Whether or not it still works…" Rachel looked at where she thought Grant was.

"Billy, you're with me. The two of you…" Grant wasn't sure what to do with them. "Just don't draw any attention to yourselves," he finished.

Billy pushed himself off the floor and grabbed a cattle prod off the counter he had been leaning against.

Grant had a thought as they got to the doorway and added, "I know it's hard for some of you."


End file.
